THE lantern under the Washington’s stern was a trembling yellow glow through the fog that drifted with us, pressing against our eyes and faces like clammy fingers, beading our eyelashes with drops through which the gleam of the lantern doubled and trebled and melted back to a single point again. The fog bit through our scanty clothes and blew its damp breath against us until, with that and the suspense, we shivered and shook. On our right we could feel the loom of the shore, and hear the waves climbing among the rocks, clicking and clacking with the sound of bayonets rattling against barrels of muskets: clucking like ramrods dropped against charges of buck-shot. We were close enough to feel the impalpable pressure of protruding headlands. Their pressure swelled and diminished as the shore-line approached or fell away.

Nathaniel, lying close beside me in the bow, held the lantern, shrouded in a cone of canvas. I wanted to throw it overboard because of the stench of whale oil and hot tin that rose from it in a reek that must, I felt sure, advertise our passing to all the British on the lake.

Except for the smell, we were a ghostly crew on a phantom vessel. Above us was the faint slapping of the cordage against the mast, and a little flutter, now and again, from the rips left in our single big foresail by the passage of enemy shot—a flutter as elusive as the sound of a swallow’s wings. We seemed to stand motionless in a thick wet world—a black, muffled world that surged past us, laughing coldly at our painful straining after the single smudge of yellow light that hovered out of reach.

I seemed, indeed, to be a ghost myself: a wraith lacking substance, incapable of further exertion: nothing but a brain without human habitation, and that brain a dull one, thinking small and hopeless thoughts—that all our labors were futile and unreal: that Ellen Phipps was lost to me now, forever: that Nathaniel’s affairs would distress me no longer, since we were taking leave of the British and this northern country: of how the river flowed past the shipyard in Arundel in the summer dusk, dimpled with the quick movements of rising minnows. Our efforts were like the marks of minnows in the water, I thought: gone as soon as made, and of as little value.

Even the stealthy sounds around me might have been made by disembodied spirits, murmuring in apprehensive sibilants of the bourne to which a silent ferryman was bearing them.

I could hear Verrieul’s muted murmur, a breath; no more: Cap Huff’s hoarser note, like the scrape of leather on a lichened rock, warning him to be still. Whisperings ran along the deck and suddenly ceased, just as successive waves of flutterings and of calm sweep a birch thicket on an August night.